The Facebook game, Farmville started the simulation games craze — and these set-it-and-leave-it kind of games are still at rage, even on the iOS. I really can’t blame the fans — these games are addictive to play, you can leave it when you get tired and when you come back tomorrow, you get to reap the efforts you’ve put in yesterday. Virtual City Playground (free via iTunes) is another one of these games.

Your City, My Project.

Virtual City Playground HD is very much like Cityville on Facebook — you grow a city, micro manage the buildings, and use the resources to grow the city some more.

The game focuses on projects — some kind of missions, where you would have to build x number of these or upgrade an x number of this type of building. For every project finished you are rewarded with in game resources, city credits, invest points and energy, to be exact. More on the resources later. That means you play the game in a particular order.

Because the game focuses on building, it just follows the game offers a plethora of those, including vehicles that transport people and goods. So far, while at level 10, I’ve unlocked more than twenty five. and have not built everything yet.

The Beautiful.

The City of Townsville...

Virtual City Playground looks awesome. The vehicles move seamlessly, sometimes causing traffic jams to each other, much like in real games. Colors are vibrant and it does use the iPad’s HD feature quite well.

The sounds are outstanding too, and you will know when a sound effect is just a normal sound effect and when something is wrong. The background music is just right and it does not cause annoyance when you play the game for a long time.

I also love the way missions (or projects) are presented in a very simplistic yet very good looking GUI. Also, I love the virtual assistant’s side commentaries.

The Not So Great.

Buy, buy, buy.

Virtual City has three main resources you must fiddle with, the city credits (currency), invest points and energy. All are needed to buy, upgrade or remove buildings and vehicles. Early on with the game, maybe levels 1 to 7, the resources are not much of a problem. However, it starts to give you headaches at higher levels. I am talking about invest points and energy. It is like the game is telling you, “Yo, pay up!”. Let me explain further.

Invest points are needed to purchase additional land for expansion and for each additional expansion, requiring more and more invest points. At the tenth level, I was unable to expand because the game requires me to use more invest points than what I have. The game then offers me to purchase invest points via their in-game sales or post once a day on my Facebook account once a day, for one invest point daily. What if I need twenty invest points? It will take me three weeks of Facebook spam just to get that Taj Mahal building.

I also dislike the game’s use for energy. A lot of energy is needed to build, upgrade, even to just reroute your transportation vehicles. The energy, though, is recoverable via passing the time or buying it using another resource. Guess what it is…. if you guessed, invest points, then ding ding ding, you are correct.

I just sincerely dislike the game’s in-your-face push for the invest points. It is like, wait for two weeks to move on or pay up and do it now.

To make things worse, there is no reset progress button. The only way to do it over again in to delete the game and reinstall a fresh one.

To Conclude:

Virtual City Playground is an awesome game, provided that you have the patience for it (and you are willing to have your Facebook profile updated with the game daily). If not, I recommend you getting another freemium city management simulation, like We Rule.